DaveStrider

antimatter consumption for my SSTO spaceplane was 50 antimatter for every flight from Eve. It had two reactors so naturally consumption was doubled. and it used a spaceplane flightpath, which takes a long time, meaning that the reactors were burning for longer. Those are two things i can think of that could improve my AM efficiency

warping from any body to its parent is going to be easy since you don't have to worry about relative velocities and all that, any body's orbital velocity will be slower than a lower orbit of it's parent, so all you need to do is warp towards the parent to establish an elliptical orbit (or a collision course if you're feeling adventurous), once you have the orbital velocity you need for a circular orbit of your desired altitude just warp to that altitude and you should (assuming i'm not crazy) have a fairly circular orbit (0.1c is way too fast for any precision adjustments. If you want a pretty orbit you'll need fuel.). This would mean Kerbol is pretty lucrative for AM farming. Am i right about this fractal, or would using gravity like that just mean you've got a lot of "downward" momentum?

at moho I get 3 science/day from a science bay with 2 smart kerbals, and 6 science/day from an AGI unit

Can we have some tanks for deuterium and lithium?

Thanks, so basically for maximum versatility you want to use thermal turbojets instead of rockets (assuming you have 750 science per jet to spare)

Hey fractal, is there any difference between an upgraded jet in fuel burning mode and a thermal nozzle?

Didn't need them, i'm not sure if that's because antimatter doesn't need fuel lines or if there's some other reason

(apparently i was wrong about the fuel costs, although i remember the flight being very inefficient) Not a great screenie to show the connections (i took this a while ago), but basically i just had the reactors behind the fuel tanks on each wing, with the jet behind that. no generators were used since i didn't need them. Antimatter is stored in a single piglet tank hidden in the cargo bay and is more than enough I haven't had any problems with the reactors except for the fact that the physical connection to the fuel tanks are a bit weak and need to be strutted in place. Also if you're doing kethane mining it might be a better idea to mine at gilly rather than hauling it up from eve.

Just FYI, my SSTO needed 25 antimatter per reactor per launch, and around half of the B9 pack's double-length fuel tanks per engine, and i made it to around 50000m before swapping to fuel burning thrust. Also, using upgraded reactors i managed to make oribit around kerbin with around 8km/s left of dV, which was more than enough to conventionally transfer straight to eve without any tug.

I use liquid fuel only, lower thrust is fine even when doing post-warp braking (the only time it's a problem is when you're in the SOI for less time than the burn needs, in which case you warp retrograde and keep burning). For conventional use there's absolutely no point using LFO since nobody could ever need that much thrust.

You could just edit your Kethane converter .cfg, all you need to do is copy/paste one of the other conversions and edit the name and efficiency.

The jet is basically just another nozzle really, everything important is actually happening inside of the antimatter reactor (or so i've gathered)

I like how all of zzz's parts have a grey-ish colour scheme, have you considered changing the nuclear reactors and the antimatter tanks to fit this scheme?

The warp drive itself converts MegaJoules into ExoricMatter, all it needs is to be powered. So you can power it with nuclear/antimatter reactors with a generator, or using the microwave reciever part. Reactors use fuel to produce ThermalPower (nuclear reactors have a full supply of fuel inside them, while antimatter reactors need external storage) Thermal power can then be used in thermal nozzles to produce thrust, or in generators to produce Megajoules (thermal power can only be used if the part is next to a reactor). Megajoules can be used by the science bay, DT Vista engine, the MPD thruster, and the Warp drive. MegaJoules work identically to the stock electric charge, so it should be familiar to you.

You shouldn't need a collector to do anything except collecting. Hyperediting antimatter for testing works fine for me.

You need to place an electric generator next to the nuclear reactor to generate Megajoules, a reactor on its own won't do anything. The warp drive will generate ExoticMatter for as long as it's supplied with Megajoules, when you tell the warp drive to warp, it will consume a set amount of ExoticMatter and speed you up to lightspeed. The mod is reasonably well documented so you can just read the front page for more information.

How serious do you plan to make the negative effects of heat buildup? I tend to build things for aesthetic appeal, and i'd rather not have giant panels sticking out of my ships.

If we're talking about colonizing planets it's safe to assume FTL travel (otherwise it's probably not going to happen ever). FTL travel, while convenient, is an extremely deadly weapon, so i find it highly unlikely that we'd let countries like north Korea use it (assuming that the west get the technology first) when they could simply make the ship face earth and demand surrender. Call me an optimist, but based on that fact, i'm happy to assume that the people in charge of colonization will be democratically elected, and by extension, care about public opinion. If we were to eliminate a (sentient) species just so we could colonize a planet there would be a catastrophic outcry, and that leader will never be elected again. So, i believe that assuming: a) FTL travel is possible, the people in charge of colonization are democratically elected, colonization would be prioritized by political ramifications as well as profit, meaning that Earth-like planets with unintelligent wildlife (probably means ape level) are the best possible for colonization. The only thing we get out of colonization is a population growth. Planet-side industry would only really be used to sustain the colony (given the prohibitive cost of launching through an atmosphere), and since our asteroid belt is more than enough to sustain our industry for a long time, trade is practically useless. Really, there isn't much profit in colony building that i can see (other than the fact that humanity isn't doomed if earth is invaded), So i doubt that we'd invade an inhabited planet just for a little more breathing room.

That ship was hyperedited to Eve's surface purely for testing, Fractal's right about my planned delivery method though, i can make kerbin orbit with around 1700 m/s of spare delta-v, which is enough to get me into eve's SOI using nothing but the fuel-burning mode on the jets.

I ended up fixing the problem with struts (i was reluctant to at first since i think they look rather ugly on aircraft), but before i did that i tweaked the breaking torque to 250 (i wasn't sure how big the changes should be so i just guessed), and that didn't help the wobble. based on your clipping suggestion i also turned off gravity, which also had no effect. i don't know if this information is useful, but i'm running too many mods and my load times are too slow to do any serious .cfg trial and error. Anyway, thanks to the magic of struts and lazy engineering, i managed to make orbit! I made the orbit pretty badly (i didn't know where the edge of the atmosphere was at the time), so that 90 fuel surplus could probably be increased to around 150-200 ideally. Now that i know i can ferry personnel from Eve's surface to low orbit cheaply (50 units of antimatter per launch) I can start my Eve colonization program!

I just designed an SSTO for Eve using the upgraded turbojets, and it should work (it managed to reach the upper limit of the atmosphere intakes) however it seems that when my jets are at high throttle (and sometimes completely randomly) the antimatter reactors wobble wildly around, sometimes breaking off entirely. I've never seen this behaviour before so i assume it's got something to do with the reactors connection to the rest of the plane. Another problem i've ran into occasionally is when i throttle high before takeoff, one of the jets runs out of IntakeAtm, despite being at sea level and having two intakes to itself (this may be because i'm not travelling fast enough to collect enough Atm) I'm posting a screenie just in case this problem is actually just a huge design oversight and has nothing to do with the mod (i think this angle covers everything important) The plane managed to make orbit on kerbin without any wobbling, and the wobbling persisted past 10km on Eve, so perhaps it's related to gravity? idk. Anyway so far i've tried toggling the gimbal of the jets, and toggling SAS, toggling the gimbal didn't help, but piloting the plane manually seemed to slow/stop the wobbling for a while (the control surfaces are pretty jittery when SAS controls them)

Sweet! it fits in nicely with the warp drive and the vista engine

Ok so my MPD thruster doesn't seem to be changing its thrust when the input to the microwave reciever changes, and is stuck at 11.9KN (using Argon as fuel). in Kerbin orbit i get around 200 MW from my (very OP) dyson sphere, but at moho orbit i get around 2GW but despite this massive change the MPD still gives me the same pathetic amount of thrust, shouldn't the thrust change with the input? EDIT: just tested the MPD with a 3.5 nuclear reactor (1.5 GW), and despite to lower power, i get more thrust (13KN). When i tested the 2.5 nuclear reactor (200MW) i got 2.7 KN thrust, so basically the reciever-MPD combo is overpowered when it's recieving around 200MW of power, and underpowered once you start getting GW's

The warp drive doesn't consume energy, it creates exotic matter which it stores and is used when needed. this is effectively the same as a system using capacitors since you don't actually need a lot of power, you simply need to wait longer to fill your E.M supply, you can easily power a 3.75 m warp drive with the second smallest nuclear reactor(the first only makes electriccharge), but it will take an age. if you want solar powered warp drives then you can either a) set up a network of solar energy satellites to beam the energy to your warp probe you may be able to edit solar panels to produce megawatts instead of E.C, although i'm certainly not sure of this. Sometimes messages get lost in popular threads like this one, passive aggressive posts certainly don't help that problem.

the base science output is scaled according to how difficult the body is to reach, the easiest being Kerbin and its moons, the hardest being Moho and Eeloo. The base science rate is then modified by the average stupidity of your kerbals, with low stupidity increasing it and high stupidity decreasing it. Transferring science is done by clicking "Transmit" on the science lab that's producing, and then clicking "recieve" on the science lab thats recieving (you must click "recieve" within 30 minutes or the science will be lost) science labs are covered pretty well in the wiki (link is on 1st page)